I’m have a CFD project with an oil/water heat exchanger in a hydraulic tank. I would be studying how effective the cooler is at lowering the temperature of the oil over a given time so, it would be a transient analysis. The cooler has two cores with water looping through them in series. Each core has 182 copper tubes that are 0.4 mm thick and 170 aluminum fins that are 0.25 mm thick with a spacing of about 1.73 mm. I want to do cunjugate heat transfer across the solid geometry, but with so many components that are thin walled, the number of cells in the mesh woul be astronomical.
I'm looking for suggestions on a basic approach to this analysis. Can the tubes and fins be compressed to mid-surfaces and run in CFA? That would require fewer cells in the solid domains. I see that there is something buried in the mesher about two fluid heat exchangers, but I haven't been able to find information on how to utilize that. Some direction there would be helpful too.
